Gaming for the Kingdom

The Voice

PAX kicked off with a bang a few weeks ago when David Jaffe, the creator of the Twisted Metal and God of War series, led off with the keynote of the conference. Yet instead of feeding accolades into the nerd pride machine, Jaffe instead chose to discourse on the highs and lows of his nearly 20 years in the video game industry. What was most striking about Jaffe’s speech was his honesty on the trials he’s encountered while making games.

The one thing that Jaffe emphasized in this was that these pitfalls were often created by his inability to listen to “the voice.” Having nothing to do with a crappy show starring Cee-lo, “the voice” was a term Jaffe used to depict the inexplicable passions within all of us. Jaffe went on to explain that when we follow these passions before anything else we will always be successful, both personally and possibly even financially. But if we chose to ignore the voice then nothing but ruin awaits us.

Although he never spoke directly about the divine in his talk, I couldn’t help but be reminded of all of the places in scripture where God talks about making each of us with our own unique calling (Psalm 139:13, Romans 9:21). This calling is coupled with a decree by God that we should follow after the things he has created us for because this is how we learn to better understand ourselves and the Lord (Ecc. 11:9-10).

In this, Jaffe was speaking into a universal truth not only of business and artistic creativity, but of all of creation itself.